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by chrshawkes 2014 days ago
No offense, I think people are crazy to rely on a stack they can easily make themselves vs. a series B startup. It's not that difficult to build and deploy full stack apps on your own server.
6 comments

how many times do we need to link to the dropbox comment before HN commenters get it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Dropbox is for end-users, this is for developers. At least I guess it is, haven't been able to figure out exactly what they offer.
Developers are end users as well
Well, how about “dropbox is aimed at the general population of computer users, and not just computer savvy developers”?
Vercel is aimed at the general population of web developers, not just the savvy ones like you
I’m not any kind of web developer.
Forever? If it made sense to everyone, there would be no upside.

The very nature of an innovative idea is that few people see it.

I Don't care. There are tons of examples of building shit on stacks that won't be around. How about investing a shit ton of time into Azure Kubernetes using Docker containers to find out they dropped support, just like this startup can drop out and never be heard of again. Good luck with that.
This is a red herring. They don't have unique technologies. Just a very, very well done and accessible combination of best practices.

I have a bunch of apps on Vercel right now and zero worry that I will be able to deploy them somewhere else should they drop out for whatever reason. They are just Node/React apps.

that seems like the nature of tech stacks, going all the way back to Flash and Dreamweaver... at least with Vercel it's pretty agnostic — I can easily switch a node app from Vercel to Digital Ocean or whatever. Never used Docker before ha, tried to get into it but the install tutorial flow was completely broken :/
"not that difficult" is plainly untrue depending on skill level, even in the absolute best case it's miles away from the ease that is offered here.

I pushed a new proof of concept to Github yesterday and deployed it in literally 3 clicks on Vercel.

Please show how to do this with AWS.

Then take a look at the features like preview deployments, CDN, environment variables etc. Does your solution cover all of them with the same ease?

I think people are crazy to accept abstraction on the machine layer but keep reinventing the wheel for the infra in the middle. These services let's you focus on the actual product.

If this view had any basis in reality, and if you really believed it, you would be crazy not to build one yourself (easily) and make boat-loads of cash from all the crazy people paying you for it.
If it's not hard to deploy on your server, then it's also easy to switch when you have to.

In the meantime you get faster, free hosting, better builds and spend zero time on ops.

I'm a designer w/ some developer experience that uses Vercel for our startup... I'd have no clue how to deploy my own server. And Digital Ocean costs money... Vercel is free for me right now
You can rub static sites for free on DigitalOcean’s new app platform
Aah.. how'd I subconsciously know OP's a trumptard? There seems to be a pattern.